The First Presidential Communications Agency

The First Presidential Communications Agency PDF Author: Mordecai Lee
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791483754
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This book explores a forgotten chapter in modern U.S. history: the false dawn of the communications age in American politics. The Office of Government Reports (OGR) was created in 1939 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but after World War II Congress refused President Truman's request to continue funding it. OGR proved to be ahead of its time, a predecessor to the now-permanent White House Office of Communications. Mordecai Lee shows how OGR was only one round in the long battle between the executive and legislative branches to be the alpha branch of government. He illustrates how OGR was in the most important sense an effort to institutionalize public reporting. Given the diminished trust in government in the twenty-first century, the study of OGR could act as a model for reviving public reporting as one way to reinvigorate democracy.

The First Presidential Communications Agency

The First Presidential Communications Agency PDF Author: Mordecai Lee
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791483754
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores a forgotten chapter in modern U.S. history: the false dawn of the communications age in American politics. The Office of Government Reports (OGR) was created in 1939 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but after World War II Congress refused President Truman's request to continue funding it. OGR proved to be ahead of its time, a predecessor to the now-permanent White House Office of Communications. Mordecai Lee shows how OGR was only one round in the long battle between the executive and legislative branches to be the alpha branch of government. He illustrates how OGR was in the most important sense an effort to institutionalize public reporting. Given the diminished trust in government in the twenty-first century, the study of OGR could act as a model for reviving public reporting as one way to reinvigorate democracy.

A Presidential Civil Service

A Presidential Civil Service PDF Author: Mordecai Lee
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817318992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
A Presidential Civil Service is a masterful account of the founding of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Liaison Office for Personnel Management (LOPM), and his use of LOPM to demonstrate the efficacy of a management-oriented federal civil service over a purely merit-based Civil Service Commission.

Congress Vs. the Bureaucracy

Congress Vs. the Bureaucracy PDF Author: Mordecai Lee
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806184477
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Government bureaucracy is something Americans have long loved to hate. Yet despite this general antipathy, some federal agencies have been wildly successful in cultivating the people’s favor. Take, for instance, the U.S. Forest Service and its still-popular Smokey Bear campaign. The agency early on gained a foothold in the public’s esteem when President Theodore Roosevelt championed its conservation policies and Forest Service press releases led to favorable coverage and further goodwill. Congress has rarely approved of such bureaucratic independence. In Congress vs. the Bureaucracy, political scientist Mordecai Lee—who has served as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill and as a state senator—explores a century of congressional efforts to prevent government agencies from gaining support for their initiatives by communicating directly with the public. Through detailed case studies, Lee shows how federal agencies have used increasingly sophisticated publicity techniques to muster support for their activities—while Congress has passed laws to counter those PR efforts. The author first traces congressional resistance to Roosevelt’s campaigns to rally popular support for the Panama Canal project, then discusses the Forest Service, the War Department, the Census Bureau, and the Department of Agriculture. Lee’s analysis of more recent legislative bans on agency publicity in the George W. Bush administration reveals that political battles over PR persist to this day. Ultimately, despite Congress’s attempts to muzzle agency public relations, the bureaucracy usually wins. Opponents of agency PR have traditionally condemned it as propaganda, a sign of a mushrooming, self-serving bureaucracy, and a waste of taxpayer dollars. For government agencies, though, communication with the public is crucial to implementing their missions and surviving. In Congress vs. the Bureaucracy, Lee argues these conflicts are in fact healthy for America. They reflect a struggle for autonomy that shows our government’s system of checks and balances to be alive and working well.

Managing the President's Message

Managing the President's Message PDF Author: Martha Joynt Kumar
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801899524
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Winner, 2008 Richard E. Neustadt Award, Presidency Research Group organized section of the American Political Science Association Political scientists are rarely able to study presidents from inside the White House while presidents are governing, campaigning, and delivering thousands of speeches. It’s even rarer to find one who manages to get officials such as political adviser Karl Rove or presidential counselor Dan Bartlett to discuss their strategies while those strategies are under construction. But that is exactly what Martha Joynt Kumar pulls off in her fascinating new book, which draws on her first-hand reporting, interviewing, and original scholarship to produce analyses of the media and communications operations of the past four administrations, including chapters on George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Kumar describes how today’s White House communications and media operations can be at once in flux and remarkably stable over time. She describes how the presidential Press Office that was once manned by a single presidential advisor evolved into a multilayered communications machine that employs hundreds of people, what modern presidents seek to accomplish through their operations, and how presidents measure what they get for their considerable efforts. Laced throughout with in-depth statistics, historical insights, and you-are-there interviews with key White House staffers and journalists, this indispensable and comprehensive dissection of presidential communications operations will be key reading for scholars of the White House researching the presidency, political communications, journalism, and any other discipline where how and when one speaks is at least as important as what one says.

Promoting the War Effort

Promoting the War Effort PDF Author: Mordecai Lee
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807145300
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
A former reporter, Horton headed the public relations department for the U.S. Maritime Commission from 1938 to 1940. Then--until Pearl Harbor in December 1941--he directed the Division of Information (DOI) in the Executive Office of the President, where he played key roles in promoting the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's unprecedented third-term reelection campaign, and the prewar arms-production effort. After Pearl Harbor, Horton's DOI encouraged support for the war, primarily focusing on raising civilian and workforce morale. But the DOI under Horton assumed a different wartime tone than its World War I predecessor, the Committee on Public Information. Rather than whipping up prowar hysteria, Horton focused on developing campaigns for more practical purposes, such as conservation and production. In mid-1942, Roosevelt merged the Division and several other agencies into the Office of War Information.

Get Things Moving!

Get Things Moving! PDF Author: Mordecai Lee
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438471386
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Recounts the forgotten but important work of Wayne Coy, the Office for Emergency Management's Liaison Officer, during the early years of World War II. Shortly after Hitler’s armies invaded Western Europe in May of 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt activated a new agency within the Executive Office of the President called the Office for Emergency Management (OEM). The OEM went on to house many prewar and wartime agencies created to manage the country’s arms production buildup and economic mobilization. After World War II a consensus by historians quickly gelled that OEM was unimportant, viewing it as a mere administrative holding company and legalistic convenience for the emergency agencies. Similarly they have dismissed the importance of the Liaison Officer for Emergency Management (LOEM), viewing the position as merely a liaison channel between OEM agencies and the White House. Mordecai Lee presents a revisionist history of OEM, focusing mostly on the record of the longest serving LOEM, Wayne Coy. Drawing upon largely unexamined archival sources, including the Roosevelt and Truman Presidential Libraries and the National Archives, Lee gives a precise account of what Coy actually did and, contrary to the conventional wisdom, concludes he was an important senior leader in the Roosevelt White House, engaging in management, policy, and politics. Mordecai Lee is Professor of Governmental Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the author of many books, including The First Presidential Communications Agency: FDR’s Office of Government Reports and The Philosopher-Lobbyist: John Dewey and the People’s Lobby, 1928–1940, both also published by SUNY Press.

Presidential Communication

Presidential Communication PDF Author: Robert E. Denton Jr.
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 027592176X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Presidential Communication is the first book to combine a study of the American Presidency with communication theory. The book brings readers a new way of looking at the Chief Executive Office. First Presidential Communication builds a case for the "rhetorical presidency"--what it means and how it works--and why an approach based on an analysis of presidential rhetoric and persuasion works better than others to uncover the essential nature of the office. The authors also examine the presidency from the major areas of concentration traditionally found in communication scholarship.

Presidents in Culture

Presidents in Culture PDF Author: David Ryfe
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820474564
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Whether writing from the perspective of rhetoric or political science, scholars of presidential communication often assume that the ultimate meaning of presidential rhetoric lies in whether it achieves policy success. In this book, David Michael Ryfe argues that although presidential rhetoric has many meanings, one of the most important is how it rhetorically constructs the practice of presidential communication itself. Drawing upon an examination of presidential rhetoric in the twentieth century - from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin D. Roosevelt, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton - Ryfe surveys the shifting meaning of presidential communication. In doing so, he reveals that the so-called public or rhetorical presidency is not one fixed entity, but rather a continuously negotiated discursive construct.

See America

See America PDF Author: Mordecai Lee
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438478097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
The tourism industry and big government: Origins of the US Travel Bureau, 1930-1936 -- The US Tourist Bureau: Birth by administrative action, 1937 -- The US Travel Bureau: Renamed and expanded, 1938 -- When business liked (part of) the New Deal, 1939 -- Congress decides it sometimes likes agency PR: Statutory creation, 1940 -- Promoting tourism during a national emergency, 1941 -- Travel promotion in wartime? 1942-1943 -- Post-War revival: Interior's US Travel Division, 1946-1949 -- Last try: Interior's Office of Travel, 1968-1973.

Inside the Presidential Debates

Inside the Presidential Debates PDF Author: Newton N. Minow
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226530396
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Newton Minow’s long engagement with the world of television began nearly fifty years ago when President Kennedy appointed him chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. As its head, Minow would famously dub TV a “vast wasteland,” thus inaugurating a career dedicated to reforming television to better serve the public interest. Since then, he has been chairman of PBS and on the board of CBS and elsewhere, but his most lasting contribution remains his leadership on televised presidential debates. He was assistant counsel to Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson when Stevenson first proposed the idea of the debates in 1960; he served as cochair of the presidential debates in 1976 and 1980; and he helped create and is currently vice chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has organized the debates for the last two decades. Written with longtime collaborator Craig LaMay, this fascinating history offers readers for the first time a genuinely inside look into the origins of the presidential debates and the many battles—both legal and personal—that have determined who has been allowed to debate and under what circumstances. The authors do not dismiss the criticism of the presidential debates in recent years but do come down solidly in favor of them, arguing that they are one of the great accomplishments of modern American electoral politics. As they remind us, the debates were once unique in the democratic world, are now emulated across the globe, and they offer the public the only real chance to see the candidates speak in direct response to one another in a discussion of major social, economic, and foreign policy issues. Looking to the challenges posed by third-party candidates and the emergence of new media such as YouTube, Minow and LaMay ultimately make recommendations for the future, calling for the debates to become less formal, with candidates allowed to question each other and citizens allowed to question candidates directly. They also explore the many ways in which the Internet might serve to broaden the debates’ appeal and informative power. Whether it’s Clinton or Obama vs. McCain, Inside the Presidential Debates will be welcomed in 2008 by anyone interested in where this crucial part of our democracy is headed—and how it got there.